Live-Action Star Wars TV Shows Not Happening Anytime Soon?

Disney-owned Marvel Entertainment is enjoying the fruits of success on the small screen, with its two ABC programs, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter, earning multiple seasons already and potentially launching more spinoffs – At least three additional Marvel TV programs are in development for the network. And at the same time Netflix is doubling down on its critically acclaimed Marvel programming as well. In the last week Jessica Jones season 2 was confirmed and reports point towards Punisher from the upcoming second season of Daredevil getting his own show too.

The point is, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a dozen films in already, has grown successfully on TV. Despite that, Disney-owned Lucasfilm reportedly isn’t interested in doing the same with the Star Wars brand, at least when it comes to the live-action TV front.

And with that, just like many of George Lucas’ ideas for Star Wars 7-12 were mostly tossed aside, so to are his ambitious plans for Star Wars: Underworld – 100 hours of live-action story set between the events of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Episode IV: A New Hope that Lucas unveiled plans for in 2005. While promoting Star Wars: The Force Awakens in December however, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy explained that the studio still had interest in “pouring through” and potentially reviving a few key projects (or ideas from them anyway), in reference to that Star Wars: Underworld TV and the canceled Star Wars 1313 video game.

Star Wars 1313 Art

That doesn’t seem to be in the cards currently. Despite rumors from last spring claiming Lucasfilm was looking into a live-action TV series project, and another rumor that they were in talks with Netflix to launch three live-action Star Wars series on the streaming service (following the success of Daredevil), ABC President Paul Lee now tells TVline that Lucasfilm is strictly focused on movies, that they “don’t have any plans at the moment.” Lucasfilm commented on this in agreement, stating they were currently only focused on animation for TV. We imagine that is only until they have something to announce of course.

Plans are changing frequently in the Star Wars universe. We saw this throughout the development of Episode VII, from release date changes to writer changes, and we just saw it again this week with a date change for Episode VIII as well, following rumors that VIII also seeing significant script changes. Combine these realities with the fact that the Anthology lineup altered and dropped a director in Josh Trank, and it’s easy to see that Disney and Lucasfilm are keeping relatively fluid with their flagship property.